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For this assessment we considered several options in regards to making our video. We considered making a video about an online stalker, tracking, tracing an individual female’s every move. Websites that she frequently uses, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and online shopping. Then we would see this individual clicking through to her recent geotagged location ultimately tracking her down to her literal, physical location leading to potential criminal act or behavior. Another option we considered was to film again involved stalker both on and offline – we thought it would be captivating if we were to film this using close ups techniques on the stalkers hands and fingers on the keyboard, we would have filmed this in black and white, at night time adding extra effect. Our third idea for a potential film consisted again of a stalker – creating a fake Facebook profile ultimately ‘catfishing’ young females and males. Moreover, we decided to make a video about human microchipping as we deemed it more original and interesting.

The process in which we took in order to prepare the video started with the group collaborating online and brainstorming using software such as Samepage while audio calling on Skype. After many of these session discussing potential script ideas we settled on human microchipping delving into the positives and negatives regarding this issue. Each member of the group was allocated a task to research human microchipping and had to find both positive and negative arguments. We then presented our findings to each other over Skype and set a time to write the script using Google Docs. We collectively wrote the script and chose to deliver it as a documentary trailer introduced by a news report about the issue of human microchipping. Further we discussed locations to film, potential costumes, lighting and choose who would film, how we would film as well as dividing up the tedious task of editing. We then decided which team member would play which character – each member then had to proof read their script and we set out on campus to film.

To film the video, we used an IPhone 7, we uploaded the footage onto one computer and then onto DropBox where we had created a group (“Team”) which each member had access too. To edit the video, we used Final Cut Pro, then exported the video to QuickTime and uploaded it to YouTube then embedding it into our individual blogs.

The underlying message of our video aims to show views both the positives and negative arguments regarding the new found issue of human microchipping. Microchipping has been around for centuries – however most commonly microchipping is known to be something one does to a pet (dogs / cats). However, in today’s society, humans are beginning to get microchipped for health reasons but also for reasons of convenience. One is able to have updated health records embedded under their skin – when there is a matter of emergency one’s medical records are readily available. Moreover, there are also examples of convenience. These include reasons such as locking and unlocking one’s house and car doors. Moreover, microchipped individuals are also able to turn their lights on and off with the swipe of a hand. Ultimately, individual are able to live a life wallet and house key free.

However, there are many negative reasons too. Firstly, microchipped individuals are known to having a higher risk to having their personal and private information hacked and traced. Moreover, this makes individuals feel as though they are at risk. Individuals personal data is constantly being tracked (Smith, C 2008) and watched. Additionally, a microchip is not a natural part of the human body – therefore electrical hazards can occur – moreover the specific microchip inserted is MRI incapable – making potential cases of emergency risky. Majority of implantable microchips are unencrypted, hence they are extremely vulnerable to being scammed (Smith, C 2008).

Throughout this assessment we divided up each task – each group member contributed towards planning and brainstorming about the script. Collectively we decided that human microchipping deemed more interesting and original. Each group member conducted lengthy research into both the positives and negatives cases of human microchipping. Next we meet up on campus to film each part, one member of the group would hold up the script, another making sure the area remained quiet and another filming. The footage was then uploaded to our teams DropBox where each member had access to. Each member was responsible for downloading and editing a different scene – posting the updated version back onto DropBox where each edited version was compiled for one team member to perform a final edit. As a group we set deadlines for each component e.g. – script, filming, editing to be due. This helped to keep us on track in order to submit the final product on time.

Mass Surveillance is the act of observing large segments of people or groups without any set system to do so. It usually interferes with the peoples’ rights to privacy. Any attempt to collect data of a group or individuals without any measures taken to limit the acquired data to specific target public or individual is a form of mass surveillance.

With the use of this method, the government can now monitor any sphere of our lives without us even knowing about it. With the help of today’s technology governments all across the globe are obtaining and processing data from huge numbers of people without even them being accused of any crime or wrong doing. Due to this the government has attained immense amounts of power over the general public.

Practice of mass surveillance by the government is not recent. This is been carried out for a long time in the history of surveillance. Some old methods of mass surveillance include tattooing people for recognition, numbering and putting people under categories, censuses and ID documenting. Presently, mass surveillance has become really easy in public places with the help of installation of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV).

The latest forms of surveillance via the government on the public is monitoring their communication patterns, which includes what we do on our phones and other digital devices like computers, Ipads and so on. I recently tweeted about it to seek public opinion about the government invading privacy. The results are below.

M.I.T. professor Gary Marx presented an argument about it (An Ethics for the New Surveillance, Vol. 14, No. 3) saying that we should measure and evaluate methods of mass surveillance before its implication on people. This can be done by asking a number of questions about the means, data collection context and the uses of that data.

There have been many protests by the public against the government for this reason. The government usually gets away from such protests by saying things along the lines of “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.”

A counter argument to this presented by Edward Snowden saying that “… If you don’t support freedom of speech, maybe it’s because you have nothing to say” (Snowden Article).

Although, mass surveillance can be used in a positive manner; anti- terrorism, census and crime statistics. It helps the government to stop major organized crimes like human trafficking across international borders, drug trades and so on. I have also talked about police surveillance in my podcast below and few other government surveillance examples across the globe.

Government surveillance does work in favor of people sometimes but in this process the government is collecting large amounts of data which can used or abused according the circumstances. This makes people vulnerable to the government. I recently watched a famous talk show TED Talk .Christopher Soghoian talks about software the governmnet is adopting. It is really interesting to know how and to what extent we can be monitored!

In the past two decades, there have been a huge technological transformation in the digital media. Surveillance industry have benefited from this transformation a lot. If we rewind our lives and think about the time when we were in school. Things were different. If I think of my time in my preschool there were no surveillance cameras installed in my school. As the years passed by there was transformation in security and surveillance system. The cameras and microphones were installed in my school. The scenario was same in my surroundings with camera getting installed on the street, on the traffic lights, offices and so on. The digitization bought boom in the surveillance industry and practices.

Present day situation is that we are under surveillance one way or the other most of the time of the day. I study in Deakin university Melbourne Campus. I noticed the number of cameras installed in the campus while walking through it. There are so many cameras even in places I didn’t even expect!

Mobile phones have become ubiquitous and basic communications tools—now used not only for phone calls, but also for accessing the Internet, sending text messages, and documenting the world(Surveillance Self-Defense)

Application culture is also based on surveillance. Apps like Uber, Google Maps, Tinder, Bank apps, they all use surveillance as their basic feature to function on everyday basis. I lost my new phone recently and I was really worried about it. I started researching it online as to how can track my phone. I tried finding it through ‘find my phone’ but the phone was off, so no luck!

Screenshot 1 by Shivangi Sharma

Screenshot 2 by Shivangi Sharma

I keep researching about it and finally found a way I can track it. “Google Maps” was the answer to all my prayers. There is a feature called ‘Timeline’ in this app which allows us to track our every 24-hour movement. In this case our digital device be it phone and laptop acts as a GPS tracking devices. It reads and store all our movement throughout the day. I was never aware of this feature. Such features can be benefitted in times like this.

I also ran a poll on twitter asking people about surveillance with apps beneficial to us or not.

63% of them voted for it be useful, another 24% agreed on a maybe and rest 13% said that it wasn’t useful. Surveillance and app culture are going well together. A majority of apps are using surveillance as their prime function to work.

Another very famous application based on surveillance is Pokémon Go. People are going mad playing it. The game functions on surveillance. It shows real life location and the layout of the game is based on it. When we play it we are connected to the pokemon server which detect our location via our digital device and create a layout of the game for us to play. This game is being a huge success.

when you realize all the snap chat filters are really building a facial recognition database ☕️🐸

With such great accessibility comes some drawbacks, some of the people misuse this surveillance practices like people making fake profiles of you. There was a tweet made by famous rapper B.o.B in recent past about ‘snapchat’ using filters to build a face recognition database. This issue was in news for a while. When asked by snapchat they denied the fact.

But the question arises in our mind sometimes “Is someone watching us right now?”.

This part of my blog has been really exciting, challenging and interesting. This is the first time I have made an “actual” video. To be honest it’s not a piece a cake. I can now understand the level of work Adam puts in his Videos! I used Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software for this task. This was my first time using any professional editing software. At first I was little panicked. After watching several tutorials on Youtube and a lot of practice, I finally got hold of it. It’s more of a trial and error method rather than just learning everything from the scratch. It took me 2 days to actually learn it and get fluent with it. I have tried and explain the topic of my video in a form of a small story acted me and one of my friends. I took several shots mini clips , went to different places to shoot.

The research and reading for this video started with looking into all the Recommended readings provided to us. I first researched the topic on a broader level and then came out with question or the sub topic I wanted to focus on. Child pornography and teen pornography exploiting so many children and teens at such young age. I researched through some journal articles about teen sexting and its association with sexual behaviour, few news articles about paedophile cases. I also researched about Australian and American laws and policies about incident involving minors and sexual harassment. I found a study by Sullivan (2002) in which he found that there are over 2500 dating websites online. These websites are visited by over 40 million people every month. There was another survey conducted on some schools in Texas. Every student was asked about their involvement in sexting. The results were really surprising. I also found out cyber safety missions. Cyber safety and media literacy programs seek to raise awareness about the risks and effects of online media use, model ethical online behaviour, and encourage teachers and parents to help children engage with what they consume (Burton 2013) .

Think carefully abut what can happen before you take or send nude or semi-nude pictures or other similar content on your digital devices. You could be charged by as a felony by the police. Be careful!

The script writing and planning of the video took much longer time then I expected. I have used many short clips to comprise of the video. These clips are acted out by me and one of my friends. I filmed various situations at various angles. I have played a little bit with the speeds and trimming of the video. I have many voice over in the video. There is a layer of changing music in the video. All the music used in this video is under the creative common licence . I have tried to incorporate video and audio transitions throughout. There is also use of voice and volume modulation. I have trimmed edited and manipulated many acted scenes to fit it together and have tried to portray a hypothetical story about a boy and a girl. The storyline resolves around revenge and sexting and how it consequences. The whole video is shoot in the portrait mode. I used my phone’s camera to shoot the whole video . I tried to keep my scenes simple and easy to understand even without dialogues. This video is a result of hours of video editing, hard work and patience.

My broader online engagement

This unit of exploring digital media has been a stepping stone in my life. It helped to loose that hesitation that I had in talking to new people. I was active on social media now building online persona every passing day. I use twitter now. Tweet about things in my life. I am on About me , WordPress and LinkedIn. These engagements are helping me in building a good online identity for my future and professional life. Adding this video to youtube has expanded my online presence as I now have a referenceable piece of work for others to view and be educated by.

I was not a social media person before. The reason behind this is that I had a different perception about engaging online. I was really selective and unsure about many factors about digital media and online identity! I have been learning about digital media lately and I must say that my perception about it has totally changed now. My online engagement is improving significantly ever since. I recently started using Twitter, LinkedIn, About.me, WordPress and Tumblr. I am more active on digital media now as compared to before as I realized that how important it is to have an online identity.

Now we are in the age of media studies 2.0 which differ from media studies 1.0 where we were taught how to read and interpret media in a particular style by referring to work of renowned people or media industries. I feel that media 1.0 limited us in a lot of ways and had set ground rules for most of the things. It’s a simple producer (media content)- receiver relationship. If I talk about media 2.0, its different, its more engaging, its more interactive. The “audience” in this case is not just the receivers but also are active contributors to “media making”, “learning” and “sharing”. The overall engagement is more as compared to media 1.0 from both consumer and producer end. The potential limitation of media 2.0 is that sometimes it can be invasion of your privacy. I would like to share a personal life experience here. Last year, I was surfing through my Facebook account and I came across a fake account which had the same profile picture as me and a different name. I can see this is happening a lot now a days not just on Facebook but other social media platforms as well, like Instagram, online dating (most common), twitter an so on. Be very sure about what you share as it impacts your online identity and online persona. We can control our online identity in many ways.

I started to tweet recently and its fun! Although it all started because it was a unit requirement I am studying currently(lol). But frankly, I am enjoying this whole new experience of microblogging, v blogging and online participation.

Twitter is a really good platform to build your online identity and a professional network for your future. It helps you interact and connect with media industries and companies for your future perspective. Twitter helps you building a presence online. It makes us visible. You get access to things and people which we normally don’t get access too. The more we use it he more we learn.

Building the online identity totally depends on us. We can control what we want to share with people and how we want to portray our self. The next question that comes to our mind is how can we control our online identity?! There are few pointers for that. Firstly, upload a good profile picture. Secondly, write a decent bio to introduce yourself to others who see you online. Thirdly, stay active and engaged online and with your peers and others online. Maintain a balance in what your tweet or rather say what you share. “Making media” is also an important aspect. Share your original tweets and have conversations with your peers. Retweet what interests you, and what you think that your peers and people you engage with online will be interested in.

I recently ran a poll on twitter about most accessed social media site and application and the result says that its twitter!

As you can in this tweet above, I have used “hashtags”. This is nice way to filter your audience or can say target your audience. Nowadays I am using a lot of #ALC203 hashtag as it is my unit hashtag. The sole purpose for using it is to make myself visible to all the people using this and engage with them online. We should keep trying new hashtags in our tweets. This also help us expand our audience.

We can also link other social media sites with each other so that in order to develop a better online persona. I would suggest to link all your professional profiles together. It will help you construct a strong online identity. I recently googled myself online and all I can find was my old Facebook profile.

i googled myself right now! All i can find was my old facebook profile..!! I am pratically invisible on google..lol :p #ALC203

This was surprising for me. This was the point when I realized the importance of online identity. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd was particularly well known for his use of Twitter, often inspiring satirical send-ups by comedians nationwide. When Julia Gillard replaced Rudd as prime minister, she bowed to the pressure to establish a Twitter account very quickly, declaring that she would be writing her own ‘tweets’ (Counihan, 2010). Keep tweeting J

According to Mark Changizi,” One facet of social media that has gone largely unnoticed: Multiple personalities.” Our online persona mostly differs on different social media sites. My Facebook profile is different from Twitter or LinkedIn. Why do you think this happens? Well the answer to this is that the target audience is different.

Another fad that we can’t have ignored is the selfie craze. So what is a selfie? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a selfie is ‘a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media.’ The selfie culture is really taking over the digital media. There have been selfies, straight from net breaking (Kim’s Kardashian nude selfie) to heart rending beautiful ones. Selfies can legit make or break you. For instance, sexting selfies, once leaked they are impossible to completely wife off, internet will make sure of that. But at the same time, selfies have had a positive impact too, they are the new cool thing. And nothing makes a president cooler than taking a selfie, President Obama proved that officially. The Chain-smoker’s song SELFIE gathered millions of views within days of its release and its main tag line can’t be any more appropriate, “But first let me take a selfie!”

Dropped food?! Take a selfie!

Killed a fly?! Take a selfie!

Work overload?! Take a selfie!

Studied too much?! Take a selfie!

Over the months, some hilariously to not so hilariously ridiculous selfies have surfaced on the world wide web.

Let’s take a look at this masterpiece here. A funeral selfie, I bet the corpse is turning in the coffin wanting to participate in the selfie himself.

Selfie can also define your online identity. We take lot of weird selfies with our family and friends but do not upload all! The reason behind this that we care about our online identity. We always keep a check about we share with others on the network.

In the last couple of weeks i have really worked on my online identity. When i started learning about digital media , i was only active on Facebook. but now i am also using other social media platforms actively.I am loving it. I am now more invisible on digital media!

Hello everyone, my name is Shivangi Sharma and I am 24 years old. This is a whole new experience for me. I have always been scared of writing essays and other things like this. I am going try this time! So, before I start with blogging about social media, digital media, communication and other related concepts , I want to tell you a few things about me.

I was born to an army officer and a teacher. I must say a tough combination. I was raised like a tomboy and ever since I have been like that. I completed my schooling in March, 2010. I was good in science, so my mom asked me to persue a career in it. I started studying medical sciences at a prestigious institution in India.

I did it for 2 years but I wasn’t happy studying a course that personally held no appeal to me. Slowly and gradually I realised that its not meant for me. I am not a person to cut open people, though dead, in order to study anatomy or sleep with a skeleton in my room! It was a tough decision to take, leaving it after 2 years, meant I had given away two years of my life and it had all been for nothing. Needless to say, it required aa hell lot of courage.
Life has been a roller coster ever since. I regret some parts of it but cherish most of it. I worked with MNCs after that for a while. I was blank at this point in my life. I had no direction. I knew i wanted to do something good with my life but wasn’t sure about it. So i took some time analyse the situation.

My mind is always been creative and eager to experience new things in life. I asked myself one question ,”What will make me happy?”. I just love clicking pictures. I feel pictures are the medium of capturing the moments and keeping them safe. So that one day, while you are sitting in a worn out rocking chair, you can snap open this pendora box of old memories, and tell all those vivid stories through these pictures to your kids or maybe grandkids or maybe just look at them and reminisce about the good ol’ days with a fond smile and a llone ear rolling down the cheek.

I also love travelling. Although i still have a lot left on bucket list. I am a big time animal lover. Wild life fascinates me too much. I can keep going like this!😀

Well all this made sense to me! I started looking for universities to apply. I came across Deakin and i knew this will be a decent choice for me. So here I am, pursuing my bachelors in Media and Communication where I wish to excel in travel media and photography in the future. I am also looking forward to learning about Public Relations in this course. I am really excited about my new life in Melbourne. I am loving this place and its exhilarating vibes.